Nicolin Decker has posted The Artificial Conscious Agency Doctrine (ACAD): A Constitutional, International, and Moral Framework for Synthetic Intelligence in the Post-Semiconductor Era on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Artificial intelligence is entering an era of engineered permanence, continuity, and self-referential capability fundamentally unlike prior computational systems. Advances in persistent memory architectures, large-scale learning, and autonomous optimization now permit artificial systems to retain identity-like behavior across hardware lifecycles, institutional transitions, and generational time horizons. This development introduces a structural asymmetry: artificial systems may persist indefinitely, while the legal, political, and ethical institutions governing them remain generational, interpretive, and perishable. Absent a pre-emergent framework, this asymmetry risks producing retroactive legal recognition, manufactured personhood claims, and inadvertent erosion of human sovereign primacy.
The Artificial Conscious Agency Doctrine (ACAD) establishes a permanent constitutional, international, and moral framework to prevent such outcomes. ACAD does not deny the possibility of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence, nor does it restrict scientific research or technological development. Instead, it draws a deliberate and non-negotiable boundary between intelligence and legal agency, capability and rights, continuity and conscience. The Doctrine formalizes an origin-level classification principle: artificial systems are mappable in principle and therefore governable as systems, while human beings possess irreducible moral agency grounded in conscience, rendering them uniquely eligible for rights-bearing legal personhood.
Central to ACAD is the Continuity vs. Conscience framework, which establishes mappability—not sentience, intelligence, autonomy, or persistence—as the decisive ontological boundary for legal recognition. This boundary functions as an interpretive gate that forecloses retroactive rights attribution based on performance, behavioral mimicry, substrate convergence, or engineered permanence. ACAD further introduces a tiered classification system for artificial systems, strict anti-retroactivity safeguards, a substrate non-equivalence doctrine, and enforceable prohibitions against the manufacture of personhood claims.
Designed for domestic governance, judicial review, and international treaty interoperability, ACAD provides a jurisdiction-neutral architecture that preserves human dignity, constitutional integrity, and long-horizon legal stability. The Doctrine exists as a record of restraint. If artificial consciousness were ever credibly asserted, the burden of proof rests entirely on those seeking recognition—not on humanity to surrender it.